Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Rough Cider in the Making: Peter Lovesey

I decided to post some of the articles here on Mystery Fanfare. This one is by Peter Lovesey. Peter is one of my favorite authors--and one of my favorite people! Peter Lovesey
has been a crime writer since 1970. He was guest of honor at this
year’s CrimeFest and will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at the
2019 Bouchercon in Dallas.

Peter Lovesey: Rough Cider in the Making

The book of mine closest to my own experience is Rough Cider,
written over thirty years ago in 1986. It has remained in print and is
often mentioned by readers as a personal favourite, a non-series
‘one-off’ written in the first person as if by a university lecturer,
who is persuaded or compelled to recall traumatic events from 1943 in
rural England during World War II. Much of it drew on my own memories of
being made homeless and moved from suburban London to a farm in the
West Country.

In 1944 my home was destroyed by a V-1 rocket, one of those pilotless
planes that Hitler sent over from France. Miraculously, all my family
survived while everyone in the other half of the semi-detached house was
killed. My mother had gone shopping when the air-raid siren sounded.
She had left two of her three sons in the house. I was at school nearby
and our father was away in the army. Mother had told my brother John,
who was 14, to make sure that if the warning came he took my younger
brother, Andrew, who was 3, under the Morrison shelter—a cast-iron table
that had been offered by the government to all houses within range of
the rockets. The table held up under the weight of the rubble and the
two boys were dug out alive.

Being homeless, we slept for a few nights on the vicar’s living-room
floor until arrangements were made to send us to a temporary home out of
London. So my mother and her three sons took a long train journey to
Cornwall in the West Country and were found accommodation on an isolated
farm. The farmer and his wife and grown-up son had no choice but to
accept this family from miles away. We were ‘billeted’—to use the
terminology of the time. With hindsight I can understand how our hosts
must have felt to have a woman in a state of shock and three noisy kids
foisted on them at harvest time, but for us it was difficult to
understand why we were not more welcome. The farmhouse was dark inside
and lit by oil-lamps, and had curtains across all the doors to keep
draughts to a minimum. As an 8-year-old, I found it spooky. Good thing I
wasn’t without my family, as many so-called evacuees had found
themselves earlier in the war when they were sent to the country for
their own safety.

We didn’t remain there long—perhaps as little as a month. My father,
on compassionate leave, found us a temporary house back in London, and
we returned, much relieved, to the bomb-infested suburbs. But the memory
of that time is still vivid in my mind. When I came to write Rough Cider
forty years later, it was easy to get back into the thought process of a
child, watching events unfold without fully understanding them. I began
the book with a sentence that plunges the reader straight into that
world:

“When I was nine, I fell in love with a girl of twenty called Barbara, who killed herself.”

Of course, the writer’s imagination moves on from remembered things
to events that didn’t happen in reality. There was no suicide on the
farm, no murder and no cider that I can recall. But the novel is
centered around a plot involving an American soldier posted to England,
and as a boy I did get to meet GIs at the local American Army base.
After our return to London, we Lovesey boys were invited to a party put
on specially by the GIs for ‘bombed-out’ kids—and it was wonderful. I
can still remember the silent films they projected onto a screen for
us—Buster Keaton and Chaplin—and the magician, and the food! Food we
didn’t know existed. I was one of the first British children to taste a
Hershey Bar and chewing gum. No wonder I can understand how the boy Theo
came to idolize the soldier called Duke.

So there it is. I mustn’t give away more of the plot. Rough Cider remains a personal favorite for reasons you will now understand.